Fusion Farming

The current issue of Saveur magazine, a publication dedicated to a world of authentic cuisine, lists the annual Saveur 100 and includes #51:Best Way to Raise a New Crop of Farmers. According the magazine, The National Immigrant Farming Initiative, a partnership between Heifer International and a range of locally-based agricultural programs, "is helping immigrants establish successful and sustainable farming operations." Apparently, immigrants represent a burgeoning field of new farmers filling the gap created by the decline of small farms in the United States. And, according to Michael Pollan in his New York Times article this past Sunday, culture and heritage plays an important role in the mix of known and unknown benefits humans derive from food. All very interesting, but it got even more interesting when I discovered that one of the six farms as part of the NIFI grant is located in my foodshed!

I called Skip Glover of Glover Family Farms, a 40-acre farm (pictured above)holding tight against the encroachment of Atlanta's expansion all around it. The Southeast Immigrant Farm Partners, as the NIFI program on Glover's farm is called, involves eight Hispanic families and has resulted, after three years of farming and food-centered gatherings that include a traditional Mexican oven that Skip built on the farm, in two of the families beginning to pursue farms of their own. The NIFI project is currently in its two-year period of reporting, during which the families continue to farm the Glover land. Additionally, Skip and his wife, Cookie, will be hosting a 10th-grader from Germany as part of her Waldorf-school requirement to intern on a farm for four weeks.

Prior to the NIFI project, the Glovers hosted 12 Korean senior citizen couples after noticing them just hanging around the Pan Asian Center and asking them if they wanted to farm. They came out several times a week in a bus and worked the land, on which the Glovers had built terrace farming plots to replicate their farming experience in Asia.

Before coming home to the farm, which has been in the Glover family since the 1830s and which has been farmed organically since Skip's father read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in the 1960s, the Glovers lived in Australia, where Skip provided social services to the aborigine community.

In an interview with Skip that I read, Skip refers to what's happening on his farm as "fusion farming," a mix of traditional cultural know-how, organic principles and modern technology. Fusion farming. Hmmmm. I like that. I'm not done with that.

To find out more about the National Immigrant Farming Initiative, see www.immigrantfarming.org

Fusion Farming